What gets me is for all the rah, rah jingoistic media cheerleading how unclear our goals are. Are we tring to stop the Islamic State (which poses no threat to us) because their form of capital punishment is beheading just like our good friends the Saudis? Any form of capital punishment is pretty much the same thing- drugs or bullets, bombs or beheadings. Perhaps it’s to destroy the Khorasan Group which is planning strikes in the U.S. “imminently” in the sense of sometime between now and the heat death of the universe, but which now seem to be the “Wolf Unit”, a sniper training school used by all the anti-Asaad factions including the ones we claim are still “moderate”. And speaking of Asaad, wasn’t he our new next Hitler?
All this spinning makes me dizzy.
After U.S. Sanctions & Wars Tore Iraq Apart, Can American-Led Strikes Be Expected to Save It?
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Islamic State militants have reportedly made advances in both Iraq and Syria despite an escalating U.S.-led bombing. In Iraq, militants are said to have seized control of the town of Heet in Anbar province. In Syria, militants have advanced on Kurdish towns near the Turkish border, forcing tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds to flee in recent days. The United Nations says more than 1,100 Iraqis were killed in violence last month. The actual toll is far higher because it does not include deaths in areas controlled by the Islamic State. The United Nations says the Islamic State has carried out mass executions, abducted women and girls as sex slaves, and used children as fighters. The United Nations also says airstrikes by the Iraqi government have caused “significant civilian deaths and injuries.” This comes as the White House has confirmed it has relaxed standards aimed at preventing civilian deaths for the U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria.
“War Has Failed Miserably”: Could U.S. Strikes Unite Extremists at Odds in Syria?
Monday, September 29, 2014
In an interview with CBS’s 60 Minutes on Sunday, President Obama acknowledged the United States has underestimated the rise of the Islamic State. With the U.S. military operation in Iraq and Syria now expanding, we are joined by Raed Jarrar, Iraqi-American blogger, political analyst, and policy impacts coordinator at the American Friends Service Committee. “The U.S. military force to deal with extremist groups has been tried before, and it has failed miserably,” Jarrar says. “The U.S. military intervention is delaying and making a political solution harder.”
Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s Orwellian War in Iraq: We Created the Very Threat We Claim to be Fighting
As Vice President Joe Biden warns it will take a “hell of a long fight” for the United States to stop militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, we speak to Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, “Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield.” We talk about how the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that helped create the threat now posed by the Islamic State. We also discuss the role of Baathist forces in ISIS, Obama’s targeting of journalists, and the trial of four former Blackwater operatives involved in the 2007 massacre at Baghdad’s Nisoor Square.
Who is Gen. Michael Nagata, the Man Tapped by Obama to Train the Syrian Rebels?
While stationed in Pakistan, Nagata wrote a classified briefing attacking the reporting of Scahill and Seymour Hersh after they published separate articles exposing secret U.S. military operations inside Pakistan. Documents later leaked by Chelsea Manning backed up the findings in Scahill and Hersh’s reports. Nagata’s report was never publicly released, but Scahill says he learned about it from a member of Congress.
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It is, after all, the CIA that coined the term “blowback” … for which ISIS is just one more example … and the point of the term is that the insiders have long understood that these kinds of things are a natural consequence of the policy we are pursuing of trying to undermine Iranian power and influence in the Middle East, and the policy tools we have chosen to pursue that policy, and so we have to be prepared to “cope with them” as they arise.
That’s why the evolving “wait and see”, to “degrade” ISIS to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, since ISIS is a side issue that insiders have now concluded has to be addressed, but as its still not the main target of foreign policy in the region, the public rationale shifts to whatever fits the print in the Mess Media.